Back in May, I participated in a gospel-centered life planning seminar called Younique, where the goal is to identify and articulate the specific calling on your life. Ephesians 2:10 is the foundation of the process:
For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. (NRSV)
The experience was offered through Community Bible Church, which is both my church and workplace. Getting to walk through the process with some of my closest friends made it even more special because of how we were able to encourage and champion each other along the way. Younique also fostered intimacy and vulnerability which led not only to deeper friendships, but new relationships as well.
Younique employs world class coaches who fuse discipleship tools, psychological assessments, and life planning exercises into a beautiful system of learning how to identify and implement the calling that God has placed on each of our lives. I promise this blog isn’t turning into a marketing platform; I just wanted to give context for the rest of this post. One of the exercises that we had to do was come up with a six word LifeCall statement. Because we were doing an accelerated version of Younique at CBC, most of the exercises had a 15-25 minute time limit, which is about as daunting as it gets. I very quickly began to freak out and wonder how I was going to pull this off. I remember praying for clarity and wisdom only seconds before the Spirit gave me the six words that would change my life forever: “Encouraging people to defy the diagnosis.”
I sat there for what seemed like an eternity, thanking God and trying to process what those six words meant to me. The goal of Younique is to help you discover how your story, passions and talents come together to form your life call, and to see that expressed in one short sentence brought tears to my eyes. The implications of the word “diagnosis” became incredibly profound when I realized that a diagnosis can be more than just a medical condition. Whether it’s a label, name, stereotype, or anything that you allow your identity to become, it’s very easy to identify ourselves by the things that people say about us. If someone called me a giraffe, I wouldn’t be too offended because I know that to be objectively incorrect. In much the same way, I would argue that we are affected by these false diagnoses only because we believe them to true, when in reality, they aren’t.
I can’t go any further without giving a shoutout to my friend Dave Rhodes. Dave is one of the co-founders of Younique and the Pastor of Discipleship and Movement Initiatives at Grace Fellowship Church in Atlanta. He is one of the greatest mentors and coaches that I’ve ever known. He personally invested in me and helped mine out truths in my heart that I don’t think I would’ve been able to unearth on my own. I’m eternally grateful for his leadership and passion for equipping believers. What I didn’t realize at the time is that Dave is an example of the Lord setting things into motion. From my boss extending an invitation for Younique to speaking in front of 1,400 kids only a few weeks after the process, the groundwork for Defy The Diagnosis was being laid. My hope is that you wouldn’t just see this blog as me telling you a story. My desire is that you would read this post and find joy, peace, and courage. I didn’t create this blog for myself, I created it for people. That said, I’d love to hear your story!